The Sanctuary (8 page)

E
velyn’s mind had been swirling with questions ever since Farouk had bailed on her in Zabqine. True to his word, he was standing there, puffing away nervously, waiting for her by the clock tower that stood at the center of the Place de l’Étoile.

A little over a hundred years old, the tower had seen the worst of the civil war and had remarkably survived despite sitting right on the notorious Green Line that divided East from West Beirut. Almost fifteen years after each crenellation of its exquisite Ottoman craftsmanship had meticulously been restored, it now stood sentinel over a city that was once again seething with anger and outrage. Lebanese flags and highly charged antiwar banners fluttered from its sides, while graphic images of the horrors of the recent fighting loomed over its base.

Farouk had chosen well. The piazza was brimming with people, some of them taking in the display in stunned silence, others striding past carrying shopping bags or chatting on their cell phones with detached insouciance. It was easy to go unnoticed in the crowd, which was exactly what he needed. Having the Parliament building across the square, with the handful of armed soldiers posted there, was also a plus.

He stubbed his cigarette out just as Evelyn reached him and, after casting an apprehensive glance over her shoulder, led her away from the tower and down one of the radiating, arcaded streets.

Evelyn dispensed with the small talk and jumped right in. “Farouk, what’s going on? What did you mean by Hajj Ali’s being dead because of these? What happened to him?”

Farouk stopped at a quiet corner by a shuttered art gallery. He turned to her, his fingers trembling as he pulled out and lit another cigarette. A shadow fell across his face as he seemed to struggle with some evidently painful memories.

“When Abu Barzan—my friend in
Mosul
—when he first showed me what he was trying to sell, I immediately thought of you for the book with the Ouroboros. The rest…they were very nice pieces, there’s no doubt, but I knew you wouldn’t be interested in being a part of anything like that. But you have to understand, the other pieces, they’re the ones that are more obviously valuable, and, as I said before, I needed to get some money, as much as I could, to get away from that cursed place for good. I tried to contact some of my clients who were, shall we say, less conscientious, but I don’t have many of those. So I also told Ali about it. He had some good contacts, a different clientele than mine, ones who ask fewer questions…. And I was in a
rush,
I had to find a buyer before Abu Barzan did, even if I had to split my share with a third party like Ali. Half of something was better than nothing, you see, and if Abu Barzan managed to sell them before I did, I’d end up with nothing. When I told Ali about them, I gave him photocopies of the Polaroids that Abu Barzan had given me.” Farouk shook his head, as if berating himself for a terrible mistake.
“Photocopies of all the pictures.”

Farouk took a long drag on his cigarette, as if steeling himself for the more difficult part of his tale. “I don’t know who he showed them to, but he came back not even a week later saying he had a buyer, at the agreed price, for the whole lot.
The whole lot.
I wanted to keep the book outside the sale—I knew how interested you were at the time in anything with that symbol on it, and I thought it might entice you to help me with selling the rest, or at least, help me find a job here in Beirut—so I told Ali to tell his buyer that he could have all the other pieces in the Polaroids, everything apart from the book, but that we’d give him a small discount to make up for it. Ali agreed that it seemed to be a reasonable counteroffer, the two alabaster figurines alone were worth far more than we were asking for the whole
lot,
and the book, well…surely it wouldn’t be missed.” He swallowed hard. “I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

“I didn’t hear anything for a week or so,
then
one morning his wife called me up. She was frantic. She told me some men had come for him, at his shop. She said they weren’t Iraqis. She thought they were Syrian, and that they might even be”—he rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if the word itself was enough to conjure up physical pain—
“mukhabarat.”

Mukhabarat.

A ubiquitous term in the region, commonly uttered in careful, hushed tones, and one of the first words Evelyn had gotten to know when she’d first hit Baghdad all those years ago. In the literal sense, it simply meant “information” or “communications,” but no one used it in that context. Not anymore. Not since it became the shorthand name for the secret police, the ruthless “information purveyors” no tyrant could rule without. Not
that such internal security agencies
were limited to the
Middle East
. In the disturbingly brutal new world order of the twenty-first century, pretty much all countries—except for, maybe, Liechtenstein—were wielding them with abandon, and they all seemed to treat their victims with an unrepentant savagery that made Ivar the Boneless’s demented practices seem lame.

“They kept her outside while the two men talked to him,” Farouk added dolefully, “then she heard some shouts. They wanted to know where the pieces were. They hit him a few times and then they dragged him out of the shop, bundled him into a car, and drove away. They took him, just like that. It’s a common occurrence in
Iraq
these days, but this wasn’t political. Before they left, Ali’s wife overheard them talking about the pictures. The photocopies I gave him. They were the buyers,
Sitt
Evelyn—or, more likely, they were there on behalf of the eventual buyer. And one of them told the other, ‘He just wants the book. We can sell the rest ourselves.’
Just the book, Sitt
Evelyn.
You understand?”

Evelyn felt a searing nausea rising in her throat. “And they killed him?”

Farouk couldn’t quite bring the words out. “His body was found that evening, thrown in a ditch by the side of a road. It was…” He shook his head, wincing, clearly haunted by the thought, and let out a pained breath. “They’d used a power drill on him.”

“What did you do?”

“What else could I do? Ali didn’t know about Abu Barzan. I didn’t tell him where the pieces came from. Although I knew him well, times are desperate right now, we live in a state of constant fear and paranoia, and I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t trust him enough to tell him about Abu Barzan so that he wouldn’t deal with him behind my back.”

Evelyn saw where this was leading. “Which means Ali could only tell them about you.”

“Exactly.
So I ran. I packed some things as soon as I put the phone down and I left my house. I had some money there—we all keep whatever we have at home, the banks aren’t safe anymore. Not a lot, but enough to get me out of
Baghdad
, enough to bribe the men at the border posts. So I took it and I ran. I hid at a friend’s house, and that night, after Ali’s body was found, I knew for certain that they’d be looking for me. So I left the country. I took buses, paid for rides on trucks, anything I could find. First to
Damascus
—it was the less obvious route than through
Amman
, and
it’s
closer to
Beirut
, which was where I wanted to reach.
To see you.
I asked at the university, and they said you were in Zabqine for the day. I couldn’t wait. I had to see you.”

Evelyn hated the question she just had to ask. Despite feeling sick to her stomach over the horrific fate that had befallen Ali, and her deeply felt grief for Farouk—not just for his ghastly current predicament, but also for the nightmare he must have lived through during the last few years—she couldn’t push the image from the Polaroid out of her mind.

She put her warring emotions in check. “What about the book? Did you see it? Do you know where it is?”

Farouk didn’t seem to mind. “When Abu Barzan came to see me, I asked him to show me the collection, but he didn’t have anything with him. It was too dangerous for him to travel with them.
Too many roadblocks and militias.
I imagine he must have kept them in his shop, or at his home, somewhere safe. He only needed to move them once he had a buyer, across the border into a safer place to conclude the deal, in
Turkey
or
Syria
—
Turkey
would be more likely, it’s not that far from Al-Mawsil—without having to risk coming through
Baghdad
.”

More questions were swamping Evelyn’s mind. “But how did he get it? He didn’t say where he found it?”

Farouk didn’t answer. He was looking beyond Evelyn, and all of a sudden his eyes lit up with fear. He grabbed her hand. “We have to go.
Now.
”

For the briefest of moments, his words didn’t register with her. They just seemed to hang in midair, a detached parallel conversation that wasn’t meant, couldn’t be meant, for her, a conversation she was witnessing remotely. Then she felt her head turn, almost by reflex, beyond her control, following his alarmed glare, and noticed two stocky men, the same two men she seemed to remember from an earlier sighting, moving forcefully through the crowd, their mouths set in tight lines under thick black mustaches, their eyes like dark slits in a pockmarked helmet and just as devoid of life, and heading straight for them.

Then Farouk almost yanked her arm out of her socket and they were moving rapidly through the unsuspecting crowd.

A
drenaline flooded Mia’s veins as she advanced cautiously through the bustling arcade, desperately scanning the crowd for any sign of her mother while trying not to draw attention to herself. She had lost precious seconds cutting through the surge of traffic and skirting around the blocked BMW, and by the time she finally made it to the pedestrian zone, the android and his buddy were nowhere in sight.

Reaching the end of the covered passage, she had no choice but to give up the relative cover of the colonnade and step out into the openness of the piazza, which sloped gently down towards the clock tower. The air around her was charged with a disconcerting blend of indomitable festivity and lingering sorrow. Hoping she wouldn’t get spotted, she slipped between the rows of diners, her palms wet with apprehension, her eyes searching for any sign of Evelyn or her pursuers.

The crowd momentarily opened up before her, and her heart froze as she spotted her mom, around a hundred yards or so up ahead, talking to a man Mia didn’t recognize. Relief washed over her for an instant—Evelyn was right there, talking to someone she clearly knew, everything was going to be just fine—before she saw the man suddenly react to something and grab Evelyn before they ran off together.

The urgency of his reaction jolted Mia. Quickly casting a glance around the piazza, she spotted the android and his buddy, halfway between her and Evelyn, not quite running but moving as swiftly as they could without attracting too much attention.

A fear the likes of which she’d never experienced in her sheltered, academic existence spiked through her and nailed her to the ground. She felt like calling out for help, but there was no familiar face to turn to, no cops to enlist, and no time to think.

She cast aside her fear, summoned her legs back to life, and tore off after them.

FAROUK AND EVELYN HURRIED down the pedestrian plaza, slicing through the crowd, moving with no particular escape route or plan in mind, both of them darting terrified glances back at their relentless pursuers while struggling to stay ahead.

“Farouk, stop,” Evelyn yelled out, her voice ringing with irritation and panic. “There are people all around us. They can’t do anything here.”

“They don’t seem to mind,” he fired back without slowing down. He would have taken the risk—maybe—had the Parliament building’s soldiers been within reach, but by the time he’d spotted the two men chasing them, they were already between them and the soldiers, and there was no way he and Evelyn could circle back to get to them.

Something suddenly caught his eye in the crowd ahead of them.
Another man, same tightly drawn mouth, same icy stare in his eyes.
Walking calmly towards him and Evelyn, his hand moving to the inside of his jacket where Farouk was sure he glimpsed the handle of a holstered gun.

Farouk saw a side street open up to the left and dived into it. It ran uphill for a hundred yards or so and led to a mosque that was at the edge of the pedestrian area.

Evelyn stumbled through the turn and righted herself quickly. Her breathing was now labored, her legs were already hurting, and it was clear she couldn’t keep this up much longer. She was in reasonably good shape for someone her age, but she hadn’t run like that for, well, ever.

They kept going, leaving behind the bustle and bright lights of the piazza, their footfalls echoing in the tunnel of darkness that now surrounded them. A thought suddenly struck her. Farouk didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t know
Beirut
well, if at all, and it didn’t make sense that he should be leading her. Evelyn knew the downtown area pretty well, but she wasn’t familiar with that alley, and surely it made more sense to stay with the crowd. Plus, going uphill, even up a soft incline such as the one they were now on, wasn’t helping.